Matt Wilde

My recent work explores the city and is inspired by my surroundings, places visited, experiences, media and at times films, sitcoms and music.

For me it is an attempt to capture a place or in some cases capture an idea of a place. Busy scenes are still evident as everyone seems to be busy going somewhere or are we just going around in circles?

I think that the viewer can relate to the paintings in one way or another, is it you waiting for the train or bus or rushing by while on the mobile talking or texting on the mobile; is it you reading the latest headlines in the newspaper or maybe feeling lost amongst the crowds. It could be that the familiar places in the work along with familiar people feel in some way reassuring and comforting or spark up memories. I like to observe a place and passers by, maybe take some photo’s and scribble some drawings down before bringing everything together on to canvas.

I often use newspapers, receipts or tickets as a foundation for the painting almost trapping a memory in time along with dates and headlines. Waiting for the media to help with promotion could take a while so I add some humour to the work by creating my own headlines in newspapers and adverts, little things like this make the work more interesting and hopefully keep the observer coming back to find something new each time they look.

I have at times been in a battle with my work style, one is more photorealist than the other but each are narrative, I think that I have reached a good solution by merging the two by bringing more colour and detail into the once black and white sketchy figures, I didn’t want to loose the edgy movement and captured figure that I feel you get with pencil, charcoal and paper. All of this being said though I’m not afraid to show all the strings to my bow and experiment further with work ideas materials and methods of portraying the message that I wish to get across in a painting.